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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Government solutions

You may or may not have heard about California’s water shortage. We’ve had a drought here for the past few years which has led to obvious difficulties in keeping this large population watered, as well as supply problems for the San Joaquin Valley, the agricultural center of our state.Well, this problem has been exacerbated by a federal judge’s timely decision to redivert a huge chunk of water back to the Sacramento River delta, at the urging of environmentalists in order to “save” the Delta Smelt.The consequences of this idiocy has compounded the problem and effectively turned the valley into a dust bowl, putting many farms out of business and thousands of people out of work. Expect prices for your food to go up too, since this state supplies the rest of the nation and that supply just took a hefty kick in the balls.Well, I saw this headline today in my daily “BC Water News” email, and felt the stirrings of hope. USDA declared California a disaster area? Wow! Maybe that’ll be enough to override the judge’s decision and get the spigots turned on again!Yes, I am a naïve fool.What it means is that they’ll be starting to make loans to the farmers.Let’s look at the implications of that, shall we? A government policy creates the conditions to put the farmer in straits of impoverishment, and the “solution” they come up with to “help” is to offer said farmer a loan. Why? The water won’t be coming back unless the decision gets overturned, so how the hell will the farmer repay the loan? What happens if/when you default on a government loan? Do they take your farm? Do you go to jail?This doesn’t make sense to me, unless the goal is to destroy agriculture in the valley, to which I see no point. So are we looking at an uncaring, faceless bureaucracy here, or evil masterminds out to do harm and create more dependents on government? Does it even matter at this point?I doubt Obama will give much of a crap about this (remember, this is a guy who thinks “economic stimulus” means literally destroying tens of thousands of cars that poor people might otherwise buy) since it likely won’t affect his penchant for arugula, or Michelle’s supply of Tuscan kale, but the rest of us proles who actually have to factor our food costs into our budget are probably going to feel this one pretty good.Your tax dollars at work; shut off the water supply to farmers during a drought, thereby losing thousands of jobs during a recession.You know, I have to go with evil. Nobody's that stupid.Like Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”.